


hold back the river

by jokeperalta



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Season/Series 02 Finale, Unresolved Sexual Tension, idk jake's sick and amy looks after him in her own way, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-28
Updated: 2015-05-28
Packaged: 2018-04-01 18:08:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4029607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jokeperalta/pseuds/jokeperalta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>‘Meat Supreme is a million red flags and eating it cold is just insane’</i>
</p>
<p>Jake gets food poisoning. Amy hates to say ‘I told you so.’</p>
            </blockquote>





	hold back the river

**Author's Note:**

> I didn’t really mean for this to be as introspective and almost character studyesque as it turned out but I quite like it… Let me know what you think!

In the upheaval of the new Captain arriving yesterday she and Jake never got a chance to actually discuss their… _moment_ , for want of a better word, in the evidence lock up. About this, Amy is simultaneously annoyed and glad. Annoyed because the longer they leave it the more complicated this whole thing is going to get; glad, because she has no idea what to say to him about it anyway.

She gets into work even earlier than usual and starts planning in earnest—she even swipes the block of sparkled notepaper Gina left behind to make herself some flashcards of possible post-kiss discussion starters. She comes up with a few good ones ranging from the super direct ( _‘Why did you kiss me and what are we going to do about it?’_ ) to the super casual (‘ _Hey there, Jake! Nice weather we’re having for the time of year, don’t you think?_ ’) and decides she’ll get him alone somehow then choose one based on what feels right in the moment. She puts them in her desk drawer, leaving it slightly ajar so nobody can see but she can still remind herself of them when he gets here. Amy works on the still unfinished paperwork from the charges for Augustine and waits.

And waits.

And waits.

By the time ten o’clock rolls around and she’s still facing his empty desk, Amy’s starting to get anxious. Jake got a hell of a lot better at time keeping since the Captain – just Holt now, Amy amends sadly in her head- came to the Nine Nine and even though he’s still late on the odd occasion, it’s not been this bad in a while.

When it gets to twenty to eleven and there’s no sign of him, Amy finally gives in.

“Sarge?” she says, forcing herself to remain casual. “Is Jake out on a case this morning or…?”

Terry looks at Jake’s desk like he’s only just realised he’s not sitting there. “Not as far as I know,” he says. “I’ll ring him, see what’s going on.”

Amy tries to pretend she isn’t abnormally invested in the side of the conversation she can hear but luckily Terry’s attention is taken off her by the new Captain sidling over to listen in too. Terry sits up straighter and his mild affirmative noises somehow get more formal.

At the end of the conversation Terry finally winces and says, “Well, take care of yourself, Jake. See you tomorrow if you feel up to it.” He puts the phone down, then announces to Amy and the Captain. “Jake thinks he’s got food poisoning so he can’t come in today. He was vomiting before he even put the phone down.”

The captain nods, purses her lips mildly disapprovingly then walks into her office. Terry relaxes again.

“The hell did he eat?” Rosa asks Terry from her desk.

“He said something about… display temperature Meat Supremes?”

 

 

-/-

 

Amy hovers outside his apartment with her closed fist next to the door for a good five minutes before she works up the courage to knock. The streak of anxiety in her personality means she doubts most of the decisions she makes on a daily basis, but she’s been second-guessing this particular decision ever since she made it this morning.

A woman with a toddler edges past her in the hall way, watching her with suspicion, and Amy smiles nervously at her. It’s the thought of being a cop arrested for loitering outside another cop’s apartment that finally makes her knock audibly on Jake’s door.

There’s no noise from inside for long enough that Amy starts to think he’s asleep. Just as she’s about to leave, she hears stumbling about inside, mild cursing and finally the door unlocking to reveal Jake—hair mussed everywhere, in sweatpants and nothing else with his entire duvet wrapped around his shoulders like a cape. The doubt she was feeling about coming evaporates when his face lights up at the sight of her. The last time she saw that look was when Sophia showed up at the precinct one evening to surprise him and Amy tries not to think too hard about what that means.

“Hate to say I told you so…” Amy teases in lieu of a greeting.

Jake smiles and leans against the doorframe. “No, you don’t.”

“You’re right, I don’t,” Amy confirms smugly, clucking her tongue at him. He nods in resigned acceptance. “I told you so!”

The air between them is weirdly charged again when she looks up, like that moment after they kissed in the evidence lock up but before Charles interrupted. Jake scans her face intently, mouth twisted up at one corner like he’s trying to hold in a bigger smile. Amy can feel her traitor eyelashes fluttering like a teenager with a crush before she can stop them. She looks away first, away from his intense gaze and the feelings she isn’t sure what to do with yet.

She holds up the plastic bag in her hand as a distraction.

“I brought you some stuff!” she tells him brightly. Jake looks surprised and it only occurs to her right there that all of this is a very girlfriend-type thing for her to do: showing up at his apartment with comfort food and supplies because he’s sick. Amy’s not sure what to do with that either but it’s too late to back out now. “There’s some tomato soup from that fancy deli café place that we worked that robbery case on a couple of years back, remember? If you feel up to eating, that is. If not, I can take it myself-”

“I could eat,” Jake says. He’s still smiling at her.

“Good,” Amy replies, relieved, and nods. “Um, there’s a bag of grapes-” pretty much the only fruit Jake will willingly eat without it being disguised as something else “-some real orange juice, not that chemical orange liquid sugar you like; some poptarts; salted peanuts; some of those trashy gossip magazines I know you secretly like and some Tylenol and bottled water in case you ran out.”

Amy can feel her face heating up as she lists off her grocery store haul. She’s totally and embarrassingly overdone it but Amy Santiago doesn’t do anything by halves and once she saw one thing she knew he’d like and would make him feel better, other things just seemed to present themselves to her that she couldn’t resist throwing in too for good measure. She even forced herself to put a few things back before she got to the checkouts… but not enough to make it not embarrassing, it seems.

“Is there an apocalypse on the way that I’m not aware of?” Jake asks and Amy blushes deeper. “Thank you though, seriously. I am actually running out of food and I couldn’t force myself to go grocery shopping right now if I tried.”

“You’re welcome.” There’s a silence where they just look at each other and the weird electric energy between them spikes again. Amy’s entire body seems to tighten with nerves or something else, her throat hollowing. She wonders if things will ever feel normal between them again.

The sound of a door on the floor below crashing shut breaks the silence and Amy takes an instinctive step back. She sees with a start how tired and pale he looks. “I should probably go,” she says almost in apology. “You need to rest.”

“No!” Jake says quickly. He seems embarrassed at how vehement it comes out. “I mean, I woke up about an hour ago and I haven’t been able to sleep since anyway. I wouldn’t mind the company, you know, if you’re not busy.”

Amy tries to make a mental pros and cons list in her head on the spot. Pros: she really isn’t busy this evening—there’s a pathetic looking steak pie for one sitting in her fridge that she was planning to eat this evening which says it all really; she hates to admit it to herself but spending time with him is always considered a pro. Cons: it might -read: will- be weird after yesterday; this whole thing is already starting to feel more and more like a romantic stylez sort of thing and they should really talk about what they actually want before the lines between their friendship and something more get blurrier.

“Okay,” Amy agrees when Jake smiles hopefully at her (it’s the clinching pro in the end) and Jake looks pleased. He steps away from the door to let her in. “You’re not going to vomit on me, are you? I get enough of that looking after my nieces and nephews.”

“Amy, I wouldn’t dare,” he says solemnly, laying a hand over his heart. “Anyway, the vomiting and fever phase was all last night and this morning—after I got off the phone with the Sarge was pretty much the last time. Now it’s just constant aching, tiredness, headaches, occasional cold sweats. You know… all the fun, sexy stuff.”

“Sounds it.”

Jake rummages around in one of his piles of stuff to find a hoodie to put on once his duvet cape goes back on his bed, zipping it up to his sternum. She splits the soup into two bowls because Jake isn’t sure he could finish the whole thing plus she hasn’t eaten yet anyway so it works out pretty well. She sits on the edge of his couch gingerly when he flops onto the other side, and he picks up a random remote out of a pile of them (Amy isn’t sure she wants to know what kind of crap they all control) and turns on his TV. That’s how she ends up spending the evening on Jake’s couch with him, watching sit com reruns and talking about everything except their relationship.

It’s so easy and natural with him that Amy almost manages to forget the elephant that they’re both very carefully ignoring. Almost. She gets comfortable enough to lean back on the arm of his couch, eventually even slipping her shoes off to put her feet up. Soon Jake mirrors her, unconsciously or not, pulling his knees up and settling his bare feet next to hers on the couch cushions so he faces her.

Amy watches him laugh -really laugh, with mouth in a wide genuine grin and eyes scrunched at the corners- at something she says and it occurs to her in the back of her mind that this is what it could be like all the time if she’d just take the plunge with him into something real.

(Her trouble is always that as much as she can see hers and Jake’s own happiness together, her past experience and tendency towards fatalism can also see it end between them someday. And it’s messy. Like Teddy, except worse because they have so much more to lose before they even start: their friendship that she values more than he realises, their working relationship. And it’s the weighing up of the two futures she sees that’s holding her back.)

“God, it’s late,” Amy says, after a glance at her watch and the darkness outside that she hadn’t noticed creeping up on them. “I should go.”

Jake smiles, almost to himself, when she doesn’t make any move to get up. At some point during the evening, he moved one of his feet between her sock-covered feet so they lined up: his, hers, his, hers.

“Do you think you’ll be in work tomorrow?” she asks.

Jake scratches the back of his neck. “Probably. I still feel kind of gross but I think I’ll go in anyway. Bet I’m not making a good impression on the new CO, being off sick the day after she arrives.”

“Probably not, but I wouldn’t worry about it,” Amy tells him.

“You wouldn’t?” Jake asks sceptically.

“Well, _I_ would worry,” Amy amends. “But you shouldn’t.”

“Why’s that?”

Amy shrugs. “You didn’t make a very good impression on our last CO either at first and he still liked you the best.” It’s Jake’s way of getting up close and endearing people to him in spite of whatever opinion they held of him at first meeting. It frustrates her sometimes that it comes so naturally to him where she cares far too much about what people think and never reaches the same level of closeness with people. But she can’t hold it against him either. “You didn’t make a very good first impression on me and look at us now.”

The second part escapes her before she has a chance to really think it through, and referencing their complicated relationship for the first time all evening reignites the tension between them. Amy avoids his gaze, swinging her feet around to find her shoes on the floor. Once they’re on, Amy leans back again and folds her hands in her lap.

“You know we need to talk, right?” Amy says softly, picking the skin around her thumb nail. It’s an old nervous habit she thought she’d kicked. “About us. About the- the-”

“-Kiss?” he finishes. “Yeah. I know we do. You wanna- talk about it now?”

Amy looks at him. Her instinct says they should get everything out in the open as soon as possible so they don’t have to work together with it hanging over their heads and so it doesn’t fester and get even more complicated than it already is. But Jake looks tired, drawn. She can’t bring herself to subject him to a heavy discussion of feelings tonight.

“No, not tonight. But soon.”

“Soon,” he agrees and it seems like he means it. Amy stands up and Jake follows her to his door. “Thanks for the company and the food—I’ll pay you back for it, soon… probably.”

Amy laughs. She never expected to be paid back anyway. “We both know you won’t. And you’re welcome.”

Jake smiles, holding his door open for her. “Good night, Amy.”

“Night, Jake.”

Amy only hears his door click shut once she’s out of sight on the stairs.

 


End file.
